At Ayushman Bharat scheme launch event, PM Modi dresses in Kashmiri 'pheran' gifted by J-K farm labourer
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday donned a Kashmiri "pheran" as he launched the Ayushman Bharat scheme to extend health insurance benefits to all residents of Jammu and Kashmir.
Modi has often chosen to dress in the traditional attire of a region while attending an event related to it. Sources close to the prime minister said he had received the pheran as a gift in winters last year from a farm labourer from Jammu and Kashmir.
He had planned to wear it during his visit to the region, but the trip could not materialise due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He took the opportunity of the launch of the scheme through video-conference on Saturday to wear the "special gift", the sources said.
He has also been recently donning Bengali shawls multiple times in his virtual programmes.
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Modi on Saturday launched a scheme via video-conference to extend the benefits of Ayushman Bharat to all residents of the union territory. He also hit out at the Congress for offering him lessons in democracy while "not carrying out panchayat and municipal polls" in Puducherry, a UT where the opposition party is in power.
Modi noted that the three-tier panchayat polls were carried out in Jammu and Kashmir in over a year after it became a union territory.
(With PTI inputs)
